A few months ago it was announced that Sinister director Scott Derrickson would be directing a big screen adaptation of the hit video game Deus Ex: Human Revolution, from a script written by C. Robert Cargill. CraveOnline talked with the director and writer of the film recently, and they offered up some information on how they are approaching the property, and what we can expect from the movie. Derrickson starts off by saying,
Deus Ex is moving like a rocket. We’ve turned in a draft of that that everyone seems excited about, and we’re very excited about that, and we’ve got a number of other projects that haven’t really been announced that have a lot of momentum also. It’s Hollywood, though. I’ve been doing this a long time, and you just never know what will come together when.
The story is set in the near future, when dramatic advances in human augmentation have triggered a technological renaissance. The protagonist, an ex-SWAT security specialist named Adam Jensen, must embrace mechanical augments in order to unravel a global conspiracy. Cargill goes on to explain that they aren't making a video game movie,
[T]he chief philosophy is we’re not making a video game movie. We’re making a cyberpunk movie. We’ve taken a look at what’s worked in video games and what hasn’t, and really what we’ve broken down is what we think the audience really wants, [what] the audience that loves Deus Ex is going to want to see out of a Deus Ex movie. And it’s not a rehashing of the game. What they want to see is, they want to see elements of the game that they love, but they want to see things that they hadn’t quite seen in the game, that the game didn’t allow them to see. So it’s really allowed us to expand upon the things that happened in the game, and the game has such a great cinematic story to begin with that those elements are very easy to extract.
He goes on to discuss some of the inspiration they are looking at for the movie,
We’re trying to break out, and really, the mold for the movies that we’re looking at… We’re looking at movies like District 9 and Looper, and Inception. Those are the molds of what we’ve been doing. It’s… Let’s push this and do something new with concepts people love, but tell a story that they’ve never seen before, that just melts their brain. And that is just hyperkinetic and smart and just hits all the right buttons that genre audiences want to see. That’s what we’ve gunned for. We haven’t tried to build it around Johnny Mnemonic or New Rose Hotel...
I don't really care what they end up doing as long as a really good movie comes out of this. Derrickson then talks about Cyberpunk, and why we haven't really seen a good Cyberpunk movie yet.
Yeah, cyberpunk is difficult. There’s a reason we haven’t had a great cyberpunk movie yet. There’s a reason why a sci-fi movie as great as Neuromancer has never made it to the screen. I do think there’s a new wave coming, and not just because the technology and the effects are up to speed, but I think that there’s a sensibility to cyberpunk that the movies are catching up with. That’s kind of how we feel. We feel like the science fiction, the reason why we reference Inception, Looper and District 9 was that they were all movies that took certain familiar science fiction methodologies and turned them upside-down and brought a grounded realism to them. Time travel, aliens arriving on Earth, going into the dream world… Those are all things that you’ve seen a dozen bad versions of, and it dozen decent versions of that. But no one, until those three films, no one had gone into filmmaking from a grounded, realistic point of view and made something with a fresh aesthetic. And I think that there was a little bit of the Blade Runner curse, a little bit of the Matrix curse, where you’ve got these movies that touch on cyberpunk elements that aren’t really cyberpunk films but they are so iconic, and so insurmountable. They’re perfect films in their own ways, [but] no one has been able to break free of that, or no one has broken free of that, and tried to go at it completely fresh. I think that we’re going to see a wave of them, I predict. I think that cyberpunk is going to break out. There’s going to be a new kind of science fiction film, and it will be cyberpunk, and it will be amazing.
Do you like the approach they are taking in turning this game into a movie? I'm excited to see how this thing turns out! Make sure you head over to CraveOnline to read the full interview.